This leaves your working tree (the state of your files on disk) unchanged but undoes the commit and leaves the changes you committed unstaged (so they’ll appear as “
Changes not staged for commit ” in
git status and you’ll need to add them again before committing). If you only want to add more changes to the previous commit, or change the commit message [1], you could use
git reset --soft HEAD~ instead, which is like
git reset HEAD~ but leaves your existing changes staged.

Make corrections to working tree files.

git add anything that you want to include in your new commit.

Commit the changes, reusing the old commit message. reset copied the old head to
.git/ORIG_HEAD; commit with
-c ORIG_HEAD will open an editor, which initially contains the log message from the old commit and allows you to edit it. If you do not need to edit the message, you could use the
-C option.

1 Note, however, that you don’t need to reset to an earlier commit if you just made a mistake in your commit message. The easier option is to git reset (to unstage any changes you’ve made since) and then
git commit --amend , which will open your default commit message editor pre-populated with the last commit message.

Beware however that if you have added any new changes to the index, using commit –amend will add them to your previous commit.

How to undo a local git commit

Let’s say a commit is made locally, but now that local commit has to be removed:

git log

1

2

3

git log

commit 101: bad commit # latest commit, this would be called 'HEAD'

commit 100: good commit # second to last commit, this is the one we want

To restore everything back to the way it was prior to the last commit, we need to reset to the commit before HEAD:

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2

git reset --soft HEAD^ # use --soft if you want to keep your changes

git reset --hard HEAD^ # use --hard if you don't care about keeping the changes you made

Now git log will show that the last commit has been removed.

How to undo a public commit

If you have already made your commits public, you will want to create a new commit which will “revert” the changes you made in your previous commit (current HEAD).